Discovering and Exploring Web Latency Spikes

After receiving an invite to use Honeycomb, the author applied the observability tool to monitor their consulting business's website, which handles about 30,000 requests per day, to proactively identify and troubleshoot anomalies such as latency spikes. They discovered the causes of these spikes by utilizing Honeycomb's SQL-like query interface and the honeytail tool to parse nginx logs, allowing them to identify and address two key issues: one caused by a poorly formed template that led to slow rendering and another by a misconfigured DNS directing unrelated requests to their server. By filtering and analyzing request patterns, they swiftly resolved these issues, enhancing their understanding of baseline query latency and request rates, thus equipping themselves to better evaluate future performance changes as new features are developed.